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PARTISAN REVIEW
in his characters' lives, between their rationalized efforts, when they
sense their situation and destiny most directly"; it was from this theater
that Stanislavsky developed a method of acting whose aim was precisely
to "imitate" the movement of the psyche prior to rational formulation;
and in so doing, modern realism returned drama to its ancient root, the
histrionic sensibility.
The book concludes with a series of short, incisively phrased sec–
tions on modern playwrights-Shaw, Pirandello, Jean Cocteau, Andre
Obey, T. S. Eliot-who have attempted to "escape realistic limitations."
It is regrettable that Mr. Fergusson did not give more space to these
moderns, especially to Cocteau's
The Infernal Machine
and Eliot's
Murder in the Cath edral.
Cocteau's effort to accept modern rationalism,
and to work back from it to "reveal the moral and anagogical reality,"
is extraordinarily interesting as Mr. Fergusson sets it forth; and Eliot
is so rarely analyzed in dramatic terms that a longer study would have
been of great value. The intuition of reality in
Murder in the Cathedral,
Mr. Fergusson remarks, is of a supernatural reality revealed finitely only
in terms of theological paradox; the play has a ritual framework, but is
based on this concept rather than on the direct perception of moral
change as something taking place in time.
In reading Mr. Fergusson's book, it is well to keep in mind that
his great theaters of the past are all ideal constructions, highly stylized
versions of the available historical material. Within each of the great
theaters there was, certainly, a good deal of actual diversity: Mr. Fer–
gusson himself draws a careful distinction between Sophocles and Euri–
pides, though the latter presumably shared the Greek "idea of a theater."
Similarly, Wagner did not stop writing after
Tristan und Isolde,
whose
intuition of reality, Mr. Fergusson notes, Wagner later renounced; and
whi,le Racine is labelled the dramatist of the theater of Reason, Mr. Fer–
gusson concedes that in
Phedre
he successfully portrays "the dissolution of
the rationalized moral being in passion and suffering." In choosing to
write about
Berenice,
of course, Mr. Fergusson picked the play where
Racine's characteristic conflict of Reason and Passion is resolved without
any real fight;-the play, in other words, that is the most finished exam–
ple of the ideal extreme to which the French classic theater was tending.
The various "ideas of a theater" are all such ideal extremes, Platonic
"ideas" in a literal sense; they coincide neither with the actual variety of
plays written at any specific time, nor even with the totality of a single
playwright's production; but they are no less useful, as categories of
historical understanding, because the reality they define only rarely
actualizes them in a pure form.
